At once a gripping thriller and a heartbreaking elegy, this is Toni Cade Bambara's powerful final testament, a hymn to Atlanta's missing children.

Zala Spencer is barely surviving on the margins of Atlanta's booming economy when she awakens one summer's morning in 1980 to find her teenage son, Sonny, has disappeared. As she takes to the streets to track down what happened to him, Zala is drawn into the nightmare of a city stalked by fear.

BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days

About the Author
Author, teacher, activist and filmmaker Toni Cade Bambara was born in Harlem, New York in 1939. After graduating from Queens College in 1959, she worked as a social investigator, and then in the psychiatry department of New York City's Metropolitan Hospital. She studied acting and mime in Florence and Paris, received an MA in 1964 from City College of New York, and went on to lecture in English at CUNY, Livingston College, and other universities. Bambara's involvement in the Black liberation and women's movements led her to edit and publish one of the first major anthologies of Black women's writing, The Black Woman, in 1970; the following year she published a collection of folktales, Tales and Stories for Black Folks, which celebrated what she dubbed 'Our Great Kitchen Tradition'. In 1972, Bambara published her debut collection of short stories, Gorilla, My Love, and then, in 1980, her first novel, The Salt Eaters, which won the American Book Award and the Langston Hughes Society Award. Upon her death in 1995, The New York Times praised Bambara as 'a major contributor to the emerging genre of contemporary black women's literature'. Her legacy was recognised with a posthumous induction into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2013.


Book Information
ISBN 9781529985993
Author Toni Cade Bambara
Format Paperback
Page Count 112
Imprint Vintage Classics
Publisher Vintage Publishing
Weight(grams) 88g
Dimensions(mm) 197mm * 130mm * 10mm